


To Entertain Strangers

by middlemarch



Series: Shadow Season 2 [2]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Angst, Doctors & Physicians, Episode 2, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Memories, Poetry, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Season 2 AU, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-21 14:42:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 10,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9553196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: What is the cure and is it welcome?





	1. “Come from California”

**Author's Note:**

> This is an alternate vision of Episode 2 "The House Guest," so spoilers lurk within! It is loosely connected to my last shadow AU installment, Gilead, East of the Jordan, but not literally. The title is an abridgment of a verse from the King James Bible.

His mother had chided him, “You never leave well enough alone, Jedediah,” for the length, depth and breadth of his childhood and it seemed she had been right, though she had also often enough scolded him that “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” which even as a young boy, he’d found contradictory; he’d learned soon enough she’d box his ears if he said as much and had either ignored her or run off to the kitchen where he was more certain of his reception from Old Cassie, mother of young Cassie, Tiberius, Marcus and Jerome, his boon companions all, and maker of biscuit, his favorite butterscotch pudding, and the Foster family’s famous chicken fricassee, with a fondness for the Young Massa he now knew he’d never deserved. 

What did it mean, to leave well enough alone? Was it acceptance or passivity? Respect or reluctance or callous disregard? Jacob had wrestled with the angel and Jesus had turned over the tables; was it wrong for Jed Foster to seek answers and if none were forthcoming, to battle for them? If he had listened to his mother, he would still be on the family plantation Mount Hebron, conferring with the overseer Mr. Haskins about the tobacco yields, withering from the inside out without the necessary stimulus of medical practice, the larger, lovelier world he’d discovered in its pursuit, Paris and Bonn, the port in New York, the quay in Le Havre, only making the plodding round of his neighbors, the fields and account books, a dull sermon delivered every week from a minister who couldn’t think worth a damn, a duller sermon from his wife and mother about the need for new linens, the quality of the beef served at dinner, for a new paper for the parlor. It would never have been well enough for him, though his mother refused to see it.

Was Mary refusing to see now? She’d accused him of hiding, of avoidance. He was a deeply flawed man, Jed admitted that without hesitation, but he thought she had chosen to see his actions with a more cognizant intention than he’d actually had, that she measured him by her own impressive standard, assuming more of him than he was and becoming disappointed by the reality. He had not imagined she would be so quick to find him lacking when she knew his limitations; he had not realized how deeply her affection was tied with to the hope that he would become a better version of himself and how dismayed she would be to find him trailing behind _too late, too late_ she had said in the hall before sweeping away, the Baroness he had once expected. 

She had argued too adamantly against him for his own hypothesis to be entirely invalid. As the Bard said, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much” and so it had been with Mary when he suggested her anger was not solely due to his deficient care of the contraband, that rather she was furious because she loved him and felt seduced by her own ardent nature, in violation of the morals she held dear. She labored to restrain her passions but he began to know her now, more wholly than before and he felt certain another conversation would yield a different outcome than her weak accusation of beguilement; he had seen it in her eyes, how she strove to convince herself she spoke the truth, and how she failed. He had decided when she first left his office he would seek her out and again when he met her in the hall and she dismissed his offer. As in any tale or Bible story, it would require a third meeting to come to resolution, he told himself, though he imagined her scolding him for impiety if he said as much to her in some happy future, scolding and then forgiving with a soft cheek on his temple, his cheek, even his lips if she was amused enough.

He had planned to find a time when they were alone, at ease and unlikely to be interrupted but he had abandoned that when he nearly knocked her down at the foot of the stairs. He stopped short but they were still close, as close as they had been when she had kissed him and he remembered how it felt to have her so near, the tension and the strange comfort. She did not appear to share the recollection and instead she had a pained look in her eyes, her cheeks pale.

“I feel our last conversation was unresolved,” he said without any preamble. Perhaps that was what she wanted, some of her own Yankee directness turned back onto her, he hoped so, but she was subdued, her eyes without the brilliance he was used to, her movements less graceful. 

“Seemed resolved to me,” Mary replied almost curtly, between sniffs. Her eyes were not red-rimmed, there was no evidence of tears and when she let out a breath, he heard the rasp of a tenacious catarrh. She was trying to put him off but she was not making a very compelling effort; she was distracted but he was not sure what occupied her.

“Are you unwell?” he asked. He had been worried the night before but she had insisted she had no need of his doctoring and had tried to convince him her unease was spiritual and nothing else. 

“No,” she said, paused, then “Yes. It’s nothing,” she added, seeming abstracted. Her left hand fluttered ineffectively in a gesture she did not complete, unlike her. He wanted to ask what troubled her, how he could help but he knew she would reject it all, the inquiry and the offer.

“It’s not a moral failing, Mary, to be ill,” he suggested. She would be concerned about her duty and whether she was attending to every last responsibility; she would consider herself last and she would not let him tell her how he considered her first, beyond anyone else.

“A failure,” she said in a low voice, echoing him but altering the word, her tone strained, tight with a suppressed cough and guilt. She raised her hand to brush back the loose strands near her cheek. She’d never begun the day so disheveled, though so many had ended with a dark curl grazing her brow or even more temptingly, the nape of her neck as she bent to scrub the instruments in the basin or replace a boy’s dressing; he resisted the impulse to reach out and touch that slender hand, to stroke the apple of her cheek.

“We are all as God makes us, you must allow-” he began, halting in his reassurance, wanting to give her what she would never ask for. Then Isaac Watts, the contraband boy she employed for errands and paid in coin and johnnycake, appeared before them and interrupted.

“Telegram, sir. Come from California.”

Jed took it in his hand and Isaac scuttled off, perceiving that he would not be offered either regular compensation this time. Before Jed could decide what to do, Mary spoke,

“I shan’t bother you, I don’t mean to pry,” looking at him with a sort of hopeless query, as if her will told her she must say it and her heart cried out to know. He unfolded it and scanned it quickly.

“It’s from the lawyer,” he told her. He wanted to hand it to her and to explain about the difficulties about the settlement and how the lawyer had instructed him to stop writing to Eliza until it was resolved. He wanted to explain how once forbidden, he had not been able to stop himself from taking up his pen and letting the words gallop across the page, how the unsent letter lay in his desk drawer and should never be sent, not even if he were permitted.

“Mary, I want you to know,” he said and he saw her eyes glance at the telegram in his hand, then to his face, her hand gripping her handkerchief. She sighed and he could not understand what it meant, nor the pause before she turned from him and walked away. Maybe, he thought, when she was herself again, he could finish what he had meant to say or she would come to him and ask.


	2. “A damning legacy”

It hadn’t been hard to slip into what had been Summers’s office, currently assigned to Dr. Foster despite his protestations, and rifle through the desk; Anne had long since perfected a posture of perfect decorum that suggested whomever she encountered had no reason to gainsay her and the only ones who weren’t taken in by it—Foster, always impatient, and his smirking, prim Phinney, gimlet-eyed Matron were all otherwise occupied when she made her way to the door. She had made sure of that as Byron wouldn’t have which was why she could not trust such an errand to him and had taken it upon herself. She had not even bothered to heave a sigh over it. She had learned his limitations early on and was a practical woman experienced at working with what little poor stuff as she came across, in London, the Crimea and now fetid Alexandria. His eagerness to please, ability to take direction from a commanding officer, and evident fondness for her more ample proportions had all tempered her initial disappointment but she knew better than to assume he was capable of anything resembling espionage or subtlety.

Summers had made no secret of his plan to leave detailed dossiers on all the key staff as he was wanted in Washington City almost as urgently as he wanted to depart Alexandria and would not be able to conduct any introductions with the new chief in person. Anne had simpered a little when he’d declared it at the dinner table and he’d been quick to announce, “I mean to write the unvarnished truth, God help the poor Major if he should be under any illusions about you all.” Foster had laughed heartily and Byron tried to join him, though she could already hear the suppressed quaver of apprehension in his guffaw. Phinney had smiled and remarked, “I do hope you will let him know I am not prepared to serve _spanferkel_ , even if he brings the suckling pig himself. I wouldn’t want him to be as disappointed as you were, Dr. Summer” to general approbation and a softer, kinder chuckling from all the surgeons, an appreciative nod from the Chaplain Anne referred to as “Reverend Stone-Face” when Byron wanted to engage in plotting pillow talk. Anne had resolved, as the laughter died down and the conversation turned to the arc of the War, that she would find the documents and know for herself what Summers thought of her and decide if Major McBurney should be privy to his unalloyed review.

Summers had bundled all the reports into a leather folio but it had been left in the top right drawer where the tang of a decent whiskey still perfumed the walnut. She longed to read every one, but she was more concerned that she should out-maneuver Phinney in the approaching new order and needed every advantage. If Summers was gracious and astute and wrote of her as he should, she would have time to search for Phinney’s and Foster’s. Byron’s was less important as she already knew what he was made of and how to manipulate him to her own ends. And there would be nothing written about Matron Brannan, a pity since she was easily the most unpredictable and underestimated member of the staff, but she’d proven herself willing to be neutral as the bloody Swiss and it would have been unseemly for one officer to write to another about the Irish housekeeper. Wise, perhaps, but not proper and with his imminent transfer, Summers had discovered a new concern for propriety and decorum. He’d only been half as drunk every night since he got wind of the position, not that it improved his conversation any, but his sutures _were_ straighter.

She glimpsed the page devoted to Nurse Phinney, wherein she was referred to by her actual name, the Baroness Mary von Olnhausen, and saw only a few words-- “rendered herself indispensible,” “conscientious to a fault,” and “writes a lovely hand, to match her fair face,” and felt her gorge rise. If only she had convinced Miss Nightingale to write her that letter of recommendation before she left for this God-forsaken position, she would be Head Nurse and that scheming Abolitionist would answer to her! She couldn’t afford to spend even a moment on the thought; her purpose was clear. She shuffled through the pages, then found her own.

“Miss Hastings exploits what authority she has—officious, discompassionate, tyrannical,” she read and seethed. The man was odious! How often had she concealed his shortcomings with her own merits, listened to his rambling about his aspirations for a desk at Washington City, bitten her lip near bloody as he dismissed whatever Byron had to say in favor of Jed Foster’s wild impracticalities! She scanned the lines “never happier than when she is lecturing to a perceived underling,” “skilled at dressing changes but oh so cognizant of the fact!” and “a harridan in the making, forever ruminating about her time in the Crimea, a hell-hole she equates with a second Eden based on her innumerable, shrill references to it.” That seemed to be the meat of it—a litany of her faults interspersed with a few reluctant remarks about her abilities, not what she had hoped for but not irredeemable. She was not unduly concerned until she turned the page.

“It is also sadly true that Miss Hastings is overly fond of alcohol, to the point of publically disgracing herself in a state of total inebriation, during which her reputation was salvaged by the quick thinking of the Head Nurse; Anne Hastings is no mere tippler but a dipsomaniac and I suspect the shortages in the supply closet are due to her inveterate passion for drink. Should she display such flagrant behavior again, you will have no choice but to terminate her immediately, though she will rage and storm.” 

Anne felt her cheeks flush and then she turned cold with a rare burning fury; the words on the page nearly danced as the hand holding the foolscap shook with her temper. McBurney could never see this—it would ruin her life and Summers had known it when he wrote it, known and hadn’t cared that she would lose her vocation, the shallow affections of shallow Byron, her already compromised reputation as a foreign nurse, no Papist but still of doubtful provenance and soiled by her work among the bodies of dying boys and men. She would burn it but she hadn’t the time. She folded the paper quickly and tucked in in the pocket of her apron, then took up the pen that lay on the desk and dipped in the inkwell, signed Summers’s name in a fair approximation of his hand, and replaced the papers in the folio, the folio in the desk. She wanted to slam the door on the way out but she knew she could not. She almost pitied whomever she would next meet.


	3. “I am easy prey to deception”

Major Clayton Ambrose McBurney III was a God-fearing Presbyterian, a physician trained, a Princeton man and Lincoln’s, but he still called what happened to him “his spells,” for all the undeniable allusion to witches and the occult. He could recall no textbook on pathology or lecture from medical school that explained what occurred and any other term—episode, event, alteration, all implied a discrete and quantifiable aspect that he had never experienced; his spells were elusive, pernicious, unfurling like noxious smoke, like the creeping darkness of twilight. He suspected it had something to do with the brain or perhaps the heart, though sometimes he wondered if it were an injury to the lungs that had started it, as he found himself breathless or panting as often as not. He had not bothered to consult another doctor as there had not been one readily available when his spells began and now, he could not imagine revealing them to another soul. He’d be considered mad or a malingerer and he was never sure which would have been worse.

He wanted to get back to the front. It was where he belonged, the field of battle, the charge, the onslaught, the men around him fighting, screaming in full voice for country, for Lincoln, he wanted the press of his men around him, his horse’s flanks a bulwark. In the day, he told himself all this and every night it was a lie. He had at least somehow learned how to stop himself from crying out with the dreams and woke silent and tear-stained, the clotted crimson scenes still present on the ceiling when he opened his eyes. He had found if he stroked the rough wool blanket with his left hand and recited his mother’s favorite Psalm all the way until the last lines “And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it,” he was able to leave the War’s freshest hell behind enough to rise and dress. The water in the china bowl stung his cheek; it drained serous and he did not understand why it would not heal. He had thought his superiors used it as a measure of his readiness to return to his proper place. As long as it wept, he would be mired at this hospital in Alexandria.

He had hoped the spells would abate but it seemed they, like the wound on his cheek, would trouble him endlessly. He had determined to fill his mind with the proper running of the hospital and drive them to the edges of his awareness, like the fly that buzzed but never landed over a gangrenous stump, but already he felt the next spell waiting and he saw he had been mistaken. He had hoped he might find a certain companionship with the other surgeons he was to supervise but that had also been a disappointment. Summers was not there to greet him and had left instead an assortment of written reviews intended, he supposed, to guide him but lacking any clear sense of Summers himself, they only served to prejudice him. Clayton knew he had not given them an appropriate review but instead had become overly focused with words or phrases which seemed to shiver on the page to attract his attention. Of Byron Hale, the words “earnest” and “ovine in the extreme,” had conveyed such a sense of the man’s unsophisticated and passive nature than he had nearly expected the junior officer to bleat his responses to the interview. The chaplain had been described as “prodigiously strong of jaw and gaze, his faith apparently uncontestable but so young, McBurney, so very young…” and Clayton had been taken aback to find Mr. Hopkins clearly a man approaching thirty, aged prematurely by the War as they all were, but hardly a callow youth. 

Jed Foster had been the greatest disappointment. “A Maryland man, finest physician of my acquaintance, with a ready wit,” and “coming into his own as an officer” and yet the overtures of friendship Clayton had made had passed by without comment. He had tried to emulate his uncle Frederick’s bluff tone at first, saying,

“Maryland man myself, hail from outside Annapolis. Understand you’ve family near Baltimore, considerable property too?” but had been answered only with a quick nod, as if his home and family meant nothing to Foster. An exchange of professional qualifications had been dismissed similarly with Foster’s response,

“St. John’s, then Harvard and the Salpêtrière. I spent some time in Heidelberg and Bonn as well. French medical methods are often seen as more advanced than our own…would you like me to have a look at that?” he’d said, quick to assign his senior officer the role of patient and forgoing all traditional civil conversation about training, the possibilities of common acquaintances or courses of study, gesturing at the wound that was beaded with discharge again. Clayton refused the offer and willed himself not to dab at his cheek with the handkerchief in his pocket. The coolness of a spell had overtaken him then and he heard himself at a remove, stating,

“I, on the other hand, am not so… magnanimous. I expect adherence to regulation. Are we understood?”

Foster, who had begun impatient, was now barely concealing distaste and his inherent tendency to reject authority as described by Summers was clearly evident in the hand he raised to salute, a mockery of a salute, a mockery Clayton could not accept. He managed to send the older man out before he started shouting at him a series of insults he knew would cause dismay and then further lack of respect.

He had barely returned to himself when Anne Hastings walked in, tatted lace at her neck and securing her coiffure, as old-fashioned as the solemn green dress she wore. He was so tired already and yet he could not beg a respite. Summers had written that she was a shrill termagant, one of Miss Nightingale’s lesser off-shoots “in dire need of pruning!” and not held in any esteem by Miss Dix, but she had not shied away from his interrogation and he found she offered herself as a trusted colleague in a way Foster had not, deferential but not obsequious. Her accent was jarring enough it seemed to keep the latest spell at bay and he thought he must keep her by him even if she should prove twice as difficult as Summers suggested. The chaplain’s interview passed in a blur and he could remember nothing much but the man’s height, his low voice as he answered questions, and the realization that Mansion House’s man of God would never provide him any spiritual solace.

The Baroness von Olnhausen entered the office with all politeness. There was a delicacy about her that both attracted and repelled him, an unsettling, attractive duality of her names and identities, the regal baroness and missish nurse, a widow and yet undeniably a lovely young woman, nubile despite her drab costume and with a reserve any chaperone would praise. Her hair and eyes were dark, not the conventional standard of beauty, but the contrast with her pale skin enticed him and he heard fragments of poetry as he bid her to sit “…from the nunnery/ Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind/ To war and arms I fly,” and “So fair thou art, my bonnie lass,” and he wanted to shake his head to free himself of them. He couldn’t and they crowded his own mind; he sought desperately for some surcease. She bent her head slightly in acquiescence and he found himself beside her, his hands in her hair, caressing the shape of the skull, tracing every curve and his voice hovering between them,

“I feel something, mm-hmm, typical female structure, underdeveloped for the arts…”

Her skin was hot and he wondered if his hands felt cold to her. She had stiffened when he first touched her but it had meant nothing to him, there was only the impulse to feel her beneath him and wait for her response. There was the vaguest sense she might lift her hand to strike him, sharp against the bandaged wound, the pain of it thrust through him like a pinned butterfly but his fingers continued to stroke her, the comfort of a woman’s braided hair and the allure of flesh that was sweet and unmarred nearly overwhelming. The light in the room brightened with a cloud’s passage and she drew in her breath; somehow the combination of those slight alterations was enough to end the spell that had begun like the immediate, invisible opening of a morning glory with her footstep on the threshold. He turned to the carefully delineated chart on the wall and took up the pedantic lecturing that might return them to some semblance of accepted interaction, which had seemed to be accomplished as he questioned her,

“…disproportionate to your conjugality,” and he’d prepared to find the calipers, to dignify his confused transgression with the name and form of an exam but there had been a sudden, muffled sound and looked over to see her in a heap on the floor beside the chair. He had never seen a woman fall in battle so the shape of her was beyond his comprehension for the first moment, the utter silence of the room something like the death he wished for before he opened his blind eyes in the morning. The calipers dropped from his hand then and made a tinny sound as they hit the floor and he was calling for help, the way he had when Winters had been shot, when Graves was bayonetted, the way he had wanted to when Johnson lost his head, fiercely, the voice of the man who had thought help would always come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> McBurney recites Psalm 90:17. He quotes Richard Lovelace's "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" and Robert Burns's "A Red, Red Rose." Princeton was traditional the school for the Southern gentleman in the 19th century; since McBurney is a Union officer, I thought making him come from Maryland, a border state, like Jed, made sense and offered an opportunity for him to seek an alliance with Jed. Jed attended St. John's College in Annapolis, MD, which was founded in the late 17th century as the University of Maryland was founded too late to make sense for his undergrad years. I thought that this scene in the show was quite frankly bizarre, since McBurney doesn't treat anyone else the way he treats Mary, asking them to sit and be be physically examined by him. Also, she passes out right after and he doesn't seem to notice she is spiking a fever. So I tried to address all of those factors and make more sense out of them.


	4. “Please don’t let them send me away”

“Jesus!” Jed had hissed, not remotely considering that it might offend the fresh-faced nun who had implored him to come, “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” 

He had not imagined that Mary, who only a few hours earlier had been planning a meeting of her nurses, arguing with him at the foot of the stairs, managing all her hundred regular duties and the extra dozen every day brought her with only a few sniffs into her handkerchief, could have become desperately, grievously ill. He gave no thought to anything other than the waxy cast of her skin and the terrifying spastic tone of her restless movements in the bedclothes; she burned with the fever and he knew she was on the verge of seizing. He shouted into the hall for ice, a tin basin, the largest bathtub they had. There was no medicine that would work as quickly, nothing else that had a chance to save her. Her pulse was thready and tachycardic, her breathing shallow though she moaned and he was not sure that she hadn’t already slipped into a delirium. He could not allow himself to think she might not recover.

“A few more moments, Mary,” he said, his hands wielding the chisel brutally; it did not seem that they did his bidding but rather operated independently but not with the same loosening the needle had brought. He was entirely alert and it suddenly occurred to him, would it have felt like this, a frantic energy he used all his will to collect and deploy, when he’d operated on Ezra if he hadn’t been loaded to the gills with morphine? Would he had found his hands steady and each action swift and deliberate, would he have been able to read the surgical manual once and have known where to cut, which vessel to tie off, how delicately to place the sutures so the stump would heal clean? The familiar, instinctive affection he held for his brother, the easy recognition of how his face looked when he suffered—was that anything like what he felt watching the woman he loved tremble with fever, her eyes closed tight against the light? He had thought he was burdened when he treated Ezra, bound to be his brother’s keeper; he had wished to help and feared he would fail but he had not had this, this urgent desire to be the only one who cared for her, to use the others as tools if he must and then to send them away. He had not felt this dread, colder at the base of his skull, his spine, than his hands in the ice, the terror he would be too late.

“Mary, don’t be alarmed,” he said, the words more a prayer that she could hear him than anything else. Matron came with more water then and shortly thereafter McBurney and Hastings. It seemed the room teemed with people and yet he perceived them only as they might help Mary, who was moaning continuously, pietously, her dark hair everywhere. Matron’s hands and her Irish lilt were to his right, Sister Isabella across, easing Mary’s shoulder from the bedclothes as he tried to get his arm beneath her to help her from the bed. McBurney was prating behind him, a cruel interruption, 

“Let the women mind her…make myself clear earlier,” Jed made out, taken up nearly entirely with Mary, struggling to find a way to hold her securely, each second anticipating a convulsion that did not come, and then McBurney took his arm as if he would pull him back and Jed whirled, shoving the man away, the sudden impulse to choke him more vivid than anything had ever been, the urge more basic than the word murder could ever be. McBurney stepped back and stayed there and then Mary was out of the bed, just conscious enough to grasp his sleeve for a moment before he took her hand, the effort of walking almost beyond her. He and Matron got her to the tub and helped her in. He spared one second to pray it would be enough.

Time was measured in her breaths, the mercury receding in the thermometer, the uneven flutter of her lashes, the pulse at her wrist under his fingers. Anne Hastings had decided to make herself useful finally while McBurney had hidden, a mysteriously odd blessing to be considered later, and Jed gave his orders quickly, the women responding to him without any argument until Anne saw the mottled rash on Mary’s bare skin and began expounding.

“…a sure sign, Crimea…she needs to be isolated!” 

He would have been drawn into the argument, McBurney emerging from the limited protection of the doorjamb, but for Mary’s soft anguished voice,

“Please, please,” and he knelt beside her, his hand moving from her shoulder in the damp muslin folds of her nightdress to her neck and then to cradle her face, recognizing her fear and awareness, the return of her essential self that he had required like the very air, as she pleaded, “I can stay here, I can be treated here. Please don’t let them send me away.” 

_From you_ he heard as if she had said it, “Don’t let them send me away from you,” and he spoke without needing to think, 

“You’ll stay, I promise.” 

He would have said anything to soothe her, but he meant it. Jed did not let himself consider that guilty catch in her voice that meant she had known about the typhoid, too taken up by her words, her jerky nodding at his reassurance. He nodded more gently, seeing the terror fade from her dark eyes and he drew from some unknown reserve of strength to make a promise he knew he would have to fight to keep. He had not been a soldier yet but he was not too old to begin. He stroked her face again, the promise in his hands now and she quieted a little; the others moved around the room but he could barely perceive them. There was only Mary and how to keep her.


	5. “I want to stay”

At first, she had thought she would be lucky, the case mild. She would cough and she might have a difficult, restless night or two, shivering and sweating, wishing someone would bring her a cool cloth for her face, a tumbler of barley-water, the simple mercy of another body in the rocking chair, and still be able to attend to her regular duties and the improvements she had planned before Major McBurney’s arrival, altered slightly to appease him. She had thought it and told herself it wasn’t so very much to hope for in the late hours of the forenoon after Emma and Henry Hopkins had helped her to her room and had left when she sent them off, neither prepared to argue with the Head Nurse who said it was only grippe. And then the sun had passed the meridian and her fever had started to rise.

Mary was vaguely aware of when Sister Isabella came in the room. She was half-asleep, pain running along her bones and keeping her from a true rest, the pangs in her head sharp and insistent. She was so very cold and despite the extra wool blanket Emma had thoughtfully covered her with, she could not get warm; it was its own agony, the desolation not within her blood but her marrow, coating her lungs with shards of ice that pierced every breath, seeming to limn every strand of hair on her head. Sister Isabella had tried to help, straightening the covers, seeking to collect her loosened, tangling hair to plait it, but Mary couldn’t bear any of it. She wanted to thank the nun, to tell her to leave it alone, to fetch some medicine from the stores or even what was left in the glass on her bureau, but she hadn’t the words, only a few tears and a whimpering moan.

She was in torment. Jed was somewhere near but not near enough and she hadn’t the breath to call him even though she heard him say her name _Mary_ and then it was as if the pain shattered the sound and she heard him say it so many times, so many ways _Mary Mary Mary_ , when he had cried for her in his own agony and when he was sullen, when he teased and when he tried tenderness, making love to her just as she’d wanted without her needing to ask. She tried to hang onto that memory, the sweetness of it, but it was wrested from her and there was a metallic, cracking sound in its place. He was beside her then and others, women’s voices close, but he was all she cared for, murmuring to her about fever, the bed, water, his arm was around her and then he was gone but she heard another voice… It was the new Major and she felt his hands on her again, wrong, wretched, touching her face, her hair until she wanted to shriek and she heard the relentless words, “underdeveloped for sciences,” and the startling dancing beauty of Riemann’s hypothesis, the transmutation of the perfect ineffable into something the flawed human mind could perceive and not be destroyed by, as Icarus was by the sun and its leaping flames like the ones that lapped at her now, that stung like Gustav’s acid, like the bile she’d retched when she miscarried, “stronger…for the care of children,” her arms too heavy to reach for the baby, to reach for her husband in his shroud, her lover who followed her with those dark eyes and then she was in the water, a different cold, a little easier with Jed’s hand on her wrist, his face intent and she wanted to tell him she was so terribly sorry but she could only tremble, the pain in her head duller, denser, taking all she had.

She was in the bed again, the women’s hands upon her confident as her own would have been once, and Jed was saying “You’ll be warm quickly” so she could believe it and then she heard his tone change, the discovery she had not wanted anyone to make, the diagnosis and the disposition, “isolation,” to be sent away from everyone, from him and it woke her from the drugging stupor sleep had been beckoning her with. She was begging him, the words repeated almost a hundred times within her mind before she gasped them out,

“Please don’t let them send me away. I want to stay. Please. I want to stay.”

_With you_ she did not say, _I want to stay with you, always and forever, please, oh please_ and his hand was at her neck and then her face, his touch all loving consolation, an affectionate reassurance and an ardent pledge that he cherished her, that he would keep her safe. She saw it in his eyes that he meant it, the prospect of her removal as terrible to him as to her. Still his hand kept stroking her slowly and said the words as a vow,

“You’ll stay, I promise.” She could believe him and she did. She slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Riemann's hypothesis is considered one of the most beautiful equations in the world of mathematics and is (paraphrasing) about prime numbers and incredibly important to a whole lot of other, less attractive equations :)


	6. “What was the trouble?”

She’d opened her eyes several minutes ago but hadn’t said anything. It was a curious pleasure to watch him in her room as if it were their room, alone together. His hands were busy among the bottles on her bureau, a testament to her earlier recognition of illness and her concealment of it from everyone. The light was softer, filtered through the drawn curtains, but she had the sense the afternoon was dying and she felt the small but vital gladness that she was not. Her mind was lazy from the remnants of the fever, the pain present but tolerable, relative ease compared to the time before, hours or minutes imprecise; for all that he was arranging the medicines, he was not there as her physician, the scene domestic and not at all professional. She had never let herself imagine this intimacy. After she had kissed him and he had embraced her, she had still not allowed it, his marriage too great an impediment and the discovery of his imminent divorce was coupled with their argument, the estrangement that had grown between them. She recalled arguing with him this morning, the overture he had made that she had rebuffed or fled from and how he had still come when she wanted him, had stayed when everyone else left, also as she had wanted if she could have said it. He turned then and she saw he did not quite smile as he glanced at her; she was not troubled by it, not now.

“Let me cheer you with some news. The young man from Concord,” he began, trying to create some semblance of normality, as if he had not held her soaking wet in his arms, seen her undressed, half-dying, as if they both did not know he had called her back from death with his hands and his skill, his voice calling her name. He would give her news of the wards as if she had been out running an errand or busy with her correspondence in the parlor and she would listen and try to play her own part without even a peignoir. 

“My Abolitionist brother,” she offered, risking the reference to the ideals that separated them, seeking to remind him of their regular exchanges without the vitriol of that last bitter discussion. He smiled and she knew she had gotten it right. He went on explaining what had transpired, coming to sit beside her and lecturing her, as he liked to do however inopportune the time, enjoying the role of professor, stopping short of taking her hand in his. He had behaved similarly during Aurelia’s surgery and the thought occurred to her that even if he did not acknowledge it, he used his education and prodigious memory as a shield from what threatened him, whatever he might fear the most.

“We implemented a nostrum, a placebo first used by Haygarth…”

“Please, Jed, not now,” she interrupted, not hearing the end of the sentence, the words an incomprehensible jumble. She listened only to the sound of his voice and she wanted him present with her, not wandering away. He shifted slightly closer to her.

“He needed to feel he mattered. And we, by which I mean you, made sure that happened,” he replied. “As sick as you are. I wish you had said, I wish you’d felt you could…” he added. If he had knocked on her door after she found the rash and she had told him, if she had let them call him when she fainted, what would be different? Would his dark eyes be any lighter? She moved in the bed and felt where the bedclothes were caught by his weight, lowered her eyes from his gaze. He spoke again.

“As for you, if it’s typhoid, the fever will come and go with severe joint pain from inflammation. It may last weeks or even…”

“Months, yes, that much I know. I’ll be nothing but a burden,” she interrupted, too weak to sound sharp, but not resigned. She had come to work, to run the place according to Miss Dix’s precepts and to make sure the Cause was justly served and now, she could do none of it. What was she then, if not a nurse, if she could not do her duty?

“Don’t say that. You’re not, you’ll never be a burden,” he snapped and then it seemed he recalled their circumstances more exactly. “When I was…ill, I was away, in isolation—you never suggested I was a burden. You were quite clear about that. I was to take the care you offered, not only because I needed to be able to treat the men with a clear head, but because I needed to be cared for, you told me I was worthy of care even if I’d brought my illness on myself. I remember, Mary, I cannot ever forget it.”

“And you feel guilty too, that you’ve brought this on yourself, don’t you? You said you were nursing that boy Johnny, the typhoid case, too well I think, since you’ve fallen ill,” he added.

“Not well enough. He died,” she said, the grief of it distant now. “Anne might have done better.”

“To hell with Anne Hastings, to hell with better. You cared for him so much you’ve made yourself ill with it, you did for him everything his mother would or his wife. What else is there?” he answered, his obscenities muted, the passion behind the words as restrained as he could make it. His jaw had tightened and she knew she would have seen lines around his mouth if his dark beard did not obscure them. She saw the crease between his brows and the light on the grey hair at his temples, scattered through his beard; she saw how he was growing old.

“I don’t know, I’m sorry. You’re angry and I- I’m tired and my head aches, you’ll have somewhere else you’re needed,” she said, ready to cry even though she knew the tears would bring no relief and when he left, it would feel like he would never return.

“Oh, Mary. There’s nowhere for me to go. Not when you are here. I don’t want to go but I will,” he said, holding her hand lightly in his, that she might easily take it back.

“No. This, you here, I want this, too much I suppose, to have you near,” she replied, hearing how she rambled, seeing his expression change, concerned and doting and relieved. She shivered and he adjusted the coverlet, his hand grazing her bare shoulder beneath the lace of her nightdress, reaching to touch her tangled dark curls with a reverence that made her draw in her breath.

“Enough. Being hard on yourself will do nothing to speed your recovery. Therefore, I forbid such talk. Now, let me take your pulse,” he said, changing the way he held her hand to lay his fingertips at her wrist, giving her his old, bright teasing smile for a moment, and then retreating. But he did not go so far, not when he held her still, in his hand, in his eyes, and she gave herself to it, to him and gladly.


	7. “You do not like rules”

Sister Isabella had been most emphatic that she would call right away, “loud as the trumpets on Judgment Day!” if Mary seemed any worse and he knew he would have to have some discussion with the new Chief if their working relationship was to be salvaged at all but it had been Mary directing him with some of her usual crisp asperity to “go on and practice medicine with a few of the others. I shouldn’t like to monopolize you,” that propelled him from the room. He still had the image of her in the bed, the lace at her neck and shoulders, her hands folded on the counterpane, as he walked down the stairs. He had a thought with each step and had decided when he reached the front hall and called for the errand boy, Isaac, who lingered, serendipitously, near the door.

“You, boy, Isaac Watts!” Jed said, gesturing him over. “I have a task for you—I need you to take the note I’m going to write to the telegraph office and ask them to send it. I can’t leave the hospital but the message is urgent. You know what that means?”

“I think so, sir,” the boy answered seriously, nodding. “Nurse Mary says it sometimes, means hurry it up.”

She was everywhere, tending them all, teaching Isaac responsibility and letters and that a white woman could be kind, teaching Jed to pay attention and to see where his duty lay and his joy.

“Yes, just as Nurse Mary says. No dawdling. And I’ll give you a penny for it. Just wait here,” he instructed. Isaac nodded again, smartly, straightening the worn, mended shirt that looked cut down from a Union soldier’s castoffs. McBurney was sure to come find him and he wanted this done first.

He found what he needed in the desk she used; he didn’t expect to use much and a wax seal was unnecessary. He doubted Isaac could read and even more, that he’d peek if Jed told him it was a surprise for Nurse Mary. He hadn’t missed how the boy’s eyes had lit up when he mentioned her and thought she would like it if he directed the boy towards Charlotte Jenkins’s supervision in Mary’s absence. 

A letter might have been easier—it seemed words wanted to stream from the pen and yet he knew the lawyer would not care, that he would be writing for himself and no one else. Brevity was indicated if speed was the goal. He considered, then wrote:

Western Union Telegraph Company  
Washington City to Sacramento

Agree to all demands for the settlement. Send final documents immediately for signature. Advise date of legal dissolution. JTF 

Perhaps he would tell her when he saw her next, if her fever had not risen. She had not wanted to listen before but he hadn’t picked the time for her but for himself. A day or two would not make much difference to him, sure of the response, but if she was stronger, he might say more. He could wait. And once it was sent, he could deal with whatever McBurney had to say and find out why the brave officer hid his face like a child at the sight of a sick woman. He called to Isaac and handed him the folded paper and a penny, warm from his pocket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Isaac Watts is the OMC I invented, oh so long ago now, to be Mary's errand boy and unofficial student. When that actor came with the telegram in the first scene, my husband said, "It's Isaac!" So I brought him back here. I imagined, based on Jed's expression, that the lawyer had indicated there were *issues* with the divorce and that post Mary's medical crisis, Jed is interested in solving those ASAP. I have borrowed the telegram format from emmadelosnardos. This chapter, like Anne's, functions more as a deleted scene.


	8. “Should anything change, find me”

He hadn’t want to leave. Miss Green, Mary’s unlikely protégé, had become nearly as skilled as her teacher in observation and conciliation and had seen it. Seeing it, she had paused and he’d understood why she would appeal so to the young Chaplain and why she reminded him of nothing more than a cousin or niece, even a daughter if he had married Clarissa Calvert at twenty the way his mother had wanted him to.

“I’ll watch over her tonight,” Emma had said and he had had to cede the chair beside Mary, where he had been sitting the past hour, watching her breathe and sleep, the candle’s guttering gilding her face as it was turned towards him. One hand lay on the pillow beside her and he had wanted to take it in his, as he had held her hand when she lay in the water, barely aware and yet unwilling to let go of him as ice melted around her and the rigors began, too slowly, to subside. And as he had held it hours earlier when she woke herself and he’d told her the only burden was to be without her, the only promise worth making was to keep her close. He was beginning to know without words the texture of the skin at her wrist, how silkily it skimmed the tendons, radius and ulna, the satisfying pulse of the artery, the circumference of the finger he wanted to wear his ring.

Jed had left and sent the telegram, care of Mary’s preferred errand boy, been given the report it was delivered and a message that Isaac sent a prayer for Miss Mary to get well real soon. There had been a small paper sack of lemon humbugs purchased with the penny shyly offered as well, but Jed was confident that Mary would approve of his instruction that Isaac keep them for himself as she was only able to take tonics and broth. He had wanted to lay a hand on the boy’s shoulder in praise and appreciation, but he sensed it would go poorly without the history Mary shared with Isaac, the meals and lessons, the errands and her Yankee accent and manner allowing the boy to accept what he longed for but was rarely given. He’d told the boy to come round the next day to see if there was a chore she needed done and he’d been given a real smile then, full of crooked teeth.

It had been a consolation, that smile, something to hang onto during the _leggero_ tenor tirade McBurney unleashed, some of which Jed forced himself to accept. Not all, though; not when the man threatened again to send her away, when she was weaker than a newborn kitten, when she needed the best care and he needed to be the one who gave it to her. Jed had pointed out that Mary served Mis Dix and not the United States Army, was not McBurney’s to dismiss, and was not his patient either. Jed hadn’t raised his voice but they both knew he was choosing not to and that he’d chosen not to strike his senior officer only hours before. McBurney had stared at Jed, very hard, as if his eyes would dart about wildly without the effort, unable to settle and Jed hadn’t liked the man’s tone when he said Mary’s name, the way he seemed to hiss the s of Baroness, swallow the final n. They’d reached some détente, that Jed might supervise Mary’s treatment as long as it didn’t interfere with the discharge of his regular duties and Jed let the younger man think he had acquiesced to a decision he’d already made. 

When he’d returned, she’d been awake, but just barely. She roused herself to talk to him but he didn’t want her to; he knew better than to tell her so and suggested he might read a little. He’d brought along a battered volume of Wordsworth and she’d surprised him with her impulsive remark that she thought he’d prefer Byron’s Don Juan. It had been a rare turnabout to hush her for her impudence and to open to Tintern Abbey and watch how she let her eyes close as he recited. He saw her fall asleep and finished “The Green Linnet,” then let the book fall shut upon his lap. He thought about the telegram’s receipt and how quickly he might expect confirmation, he considered that McBurney might be right and that to send Mary home to Boston could be best for her, to be among friends and relations in an unoccupied city, independent of the Army’s shipments of supplies and the knowledge that the time he spent with her was not given to the boys he’d pledged to save. He understood McBurney wanted Mary gone though not exactly why and resolved to defer any decisions until it was clear what direction Mary’s illness would take; he could not sacrifice her health to his selfish desire to keep her near him but if he could, oh, if only he could!

Emma had come in soon after, volunteering to keep watch and he knew it was more appropriate to have a woman in the room with her, though no one who had seen how close to death Mary had been earlier in the day could truly imagine anything salacious about his presence in the room. Emma had nodded solemnly when he’d instructed her to fetch him if Mary worsened and he had thought he would keep the image of her in her green dress, her face like a flower, Mary just beyond her a series of curves in the bed linens, her unbound hair curling around her as if there had been a night of the most decadent passion preceding; if she was better in the morning, he supposed that dark glory would be transformed into one or two perfect plaits, tied with a bit of ribbon. Anne had stood outside the room, ready with her hand-lettered isolation sign and that expression that was so hard to read, an admixture, some smug victory and some pity, the faintest apology in the way her shoulders were set. He’d leaned against the wall and watched as she walked down the hall, her skirts dragging on the floorboards, overlaying the memory of the other two women.

He had slept in his clothes, only removing his boots and cravat, pulling a blanket over himself and not bothering with his regular ablutions; he had been wet through during the day. He was clean enough. Emma’s knock came shortly after midnight, a light, incontrovertible rap, and it seemed whatever sleep he’d had was the thinnest silk between his mind and waking, rent with the knuckles of a nineteen year old girl. He was sitting up when she opened the door.

“Dr. Foster, Nurse Mary needs you,” Emma began, unexpectedly diffident. He stood, pulled up his braces and started to button his vest.

“Is her fever up? Is she in pain, her belly perhaps?” he asked hurriedly, slipping on shoes instead of his boots, unwilling to tarry.

“She’s warm, but I don’t think the fever is dangerous. She’s been calling for you, I can’t settle her down, she’ll make herself sick with crying,” Emma explained. 

She looked away as she said it and he was not sure if she was embarrassed or felt he would be. He heard himself complaining to Byron that Mary was “an expert on evasion” and understood how he had blamed her for his own unwillingness to look. She’d been ill then and known it and he’d rightly sensed it but allowed himself to be dissuaded. It was clear from Emma’s fading blush that Mary had not concealed the depth of her attachment to him, from her tone that the Southern nurse had already been aware of Mary’s feelings before she had fallen ill. Only he had been deceived.

They walked quickly to Mary’s room. She lay in the bed crying, her hitching breath suggesting the extended duration of her tears. It took only a moment to take her in his arms and ascertain the fever had not spiked dramatically. Emma lingered in the doorway, waiting for his order.

“Mary, are you in pain?” he asked. She was not guarding her belly, was loose and limp against him, and she breathed easily but he had little way to measure her tolerance for suffering.

“Mm-no, I want him, Jedediah, he’s gone,” she wept and he looked briefly to Emma.

“I can manage this. Rest now, or find someone to take you home. It’s late.” He did not spare her another glance but heard the door close. 

“Mary, I’m here, it’s me, it’s Jedediah, sweetheart,” he crooned. She turned her face into his vest, muffling her whimpering against the broadcloth. “Open your eyes, Mary, I’m right here” he added, letting the commanding tone he took during a procedure into his voice. She responded and blinked up at him, too overcome to make any pretense at manners or custom.

“You came,” she murmured. She looked ill, exhausted, heart-broken, lovely.

“You called for me. I’ll always come when you call,” he said seriously, then brushed a finger across her brow, felt the salt of her tearstains on her cheekbone.

“It was dark and I was alone. Oh! I wanted you, I thought you’d gone, you’d sent me away,” she replied, sounding so much younger than he could have ever imagined.

“I promised I wouldn’t do that, d’you remember? I don’t want you to go away, I want you here, with me,” he said, keeping the statements simple, hoping they would settle her like his heartbeat against her face, his hands touching her lightly.

“You do?” she asked tremulously.

“Yes, sweetheart. I want you with me always,” he began and she interrupted.

“Don’t let him send me away, Jed! I don’t want him near me, don’t want him to touch me again.” He thought she must mean McBurney but the man hadn’t come within five feet of her when she had been so ill—what did she mean?

“‘Touch you?’” he repeated.

“The Major, he wants to me go, but I didn’t want him to, when he touched my face, my head, I don’t want him, I don’t want to go, please—let me stay,” she rambled, but he was a clever man and he’d been in that office, with McBurney’s phrenology chart on the wall. What she suggested, a phrenology exam she hadn’t wanted, McBurney’s hands on her and then, when he realized she was ill, how quickly he’d fled! Jed pushed away the grinding urge to attack the man who had laid his unwanted hands on Mary and focused on calming her. She was still not fully awake, not herself as she had been earlier.

“You’ll stay, Mary. I will make sure of it. I won’t let you go and he won’t come near you again, I promise that too,” he said. “Look at me, tell me you heard what I said, tell me you know I’m telling you the truth.”

He’d jostled her a little as he finished talking and he felt how it woke her, the movement and the words “the truth.” She lifted a hand up, to touch his cheek he thought, but drew it back.

“I’ll make you ill, it’s too dangerous,” she said sadly.

“Nonsense, I’m the doctor here,” he declared.

“Are you? My doctor?” she replied, her old eagerness for riposte present but fear for her success as well.

“Yes. Your doctor and your colleague. Your friend. All of those and anything else you want,” he said. He wished he had not been so stubborn, had agreed to Eliza’s requests weeks ago, so he might have said something more in this moment.

“My sweetheart?” Mary asked, requested, reminded him.

“Yes. Yours, only yours, Mary,” he promised and she sighed. “Will you go back to sleep now? I’ll stay right here, if you need me.”

“No,” she answered. “At least, wash up first, I, we must be more careful this time. I could not bear to think you would fall ill yourself.”

He couldn’t help the laugh then, Mary ordering him from the circle of his arms, her eyes red-rimmed with the tears she’d wept thinking he’d left, almost every one of society’s expectations countermanded.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, the echo of the boy he’d once been in his voice, laying her down carefully in the bed. She was already the mistress of his heart and would not be gainsaid.

“I like it better when you call me ‘sweetheart,’” she whispered. If he hadn’t understand her before, it was his own fault. She was not a liar. He did not say what he thought, that he would like it best when he could call her Mary Foster but he would. Not tonight but soon—as soon as he could. There would be more to say when she was well, but now at least, he thought she would say he could call her Mary Foster and she would answer.


	9. “So tend to him I shall”

She hadn’t decided when he had simply been there, on the other side of Nurse Mary, doing far more than his fair share of helping the ill woman to her room, his strength effortless, the easy flow of his conversation helping bridge the awkwardness of Mary, trembling with fever and embarrassment, Emma’s own inability to manage the assistance by herself. It wasn’t when he had smiled, grinned really, at the announcement that her request had been granted, to be a proper nurse at the hospital and not merely the former belle tending the Confederates that washed up on Mansion House’s veranda, teased and barely tolerated for her hoopskirt and airs. It wasn’t when she could not help comparing his respectful hand stretched out to help her through the crowd and how Frank had treated her with abandon, gleefully greedy for her as if she were a sweet to be consumed, how she had had to stop him and he had been unable, unwilling to conceal his frustration which was all about Frank’s venal desire, entirely unlike Henry’s arguments in the ward about duty and justice, what sacrifice meant.

She hadn’t decided she wanted to marry Henry Hopkins until she’d been sent down the darkened staircase by Dr. Foster, the door to that golden room closing behind her, and she’d found Henry dozing on the bench by the front door. He’d woken when she took the last step, though she would have sworn her Morocco slippers were silent, and had blinked hazily at first though his eyes were the only aspect of him that was not perfectly correct. She had been startled and he had been standing beside her before she knew it. He’d answered readily when she asked,

“Why, Mr. Hopkins, whatever are you doin’ here?”

“Waiting for you, Miss Emma. You mustn’t walk home alone, it’s too late.”

She’d been so taken aback she’d spoken without thinking.

“But, you needn’t have waited up yourself! You might’ve asked an orderly or a servant.”

“No, that wouldn’t do. I shouldn’t rest if I didn’t make sure myself you got home safely,” he said seriously. He looked at her intently and she thought she might blush. “Have you a shawl or a wrap? I’m afraid there’s a chill tonight.”

She knew then she was in the most terrible trouble. She could only marry the man beside her and he was the enemy. The realization was a relief and a whole world of misery, as Belinda would say, and she couldn’t regret any of it. And she couldn’t let Henry see, not yet, and perhaps not ever.


End file.
